


your ghosts could be angels from here

by raven (singlecrow)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: M/M, Martin is nice to him, That's it, a box of files lands on Jon's head, that's the story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:02:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23987818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/raven
Summary: “Do you want tea,” Martin says, leaving off the question mark for once. Jon might still be Martin’s irritable, forceful, kind-of-a-dick boss, but even he seems softer outside the confines of the Institute. As though the sharp edges of paper and spools of magnetic tape are for him, skeletal; as though without them he can’t quite hold himself up.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 16
Kudos: 223





	your ghosts could be angels from here

**Author's Note:**

> Set during early s2.

A few years ago, just after Martin moved to London, took the job at the Institute and was worrying every minute that someone might discover he wasn’t thirty-three years old and didn't have anything like a Masters in parapsychology, he went to his GP and explained that he couldn’t sleep at night. She put him on a waiting list for therapy - which as far as he knows he’s still on - and gave him a couple of boxes of sleeping pills. He tried them for a couple of nights and didn’t like them much; they got him to sleep but he woke up in the morning feeling like the sort of shambling zombie teenage stoners made statements to the Institute about. The days and weeks passed and no one sprang up from behind a desk to angrily wave a copy of his CV at him, and eventually herbal tea and not looking at his phone too late in the evening made a difference. So he never slept well, exactly, not like he had before he came to the Institute, but the sleeping pills went in the bathroom cabinet to gather dust. 

Except, now, they’re sort of sitting on Martin’s kitchen counter.

So is a small bottle of orange juice, the bitty kind he knows Jon likes. Martin bought it a couple of days ago and set it on the counter next to the pestle and mortar he usually uses for grinding cloves and cardamom, and next to that, there are the two grimy NHS-stamped boxes, with the old prescription label peeling off. It’s a still life of sorts, a tableau of a terrible idea. He can’t _drug his boss_. Even if it would be for his own good; even if it makes Martin’s bones ache to look at him. That’s not something normal people do. Not something good people do.

The pills are still in date, though. Martin checked.

*

Jon is absolutely fine, according to him. It’s been a trying few weeks, he says, but he’s better now. 

“But you don’t,” Martin says. “You don’t seem—“

“I’m sure you have work to do, Martin,” Jon says, putting away case number #0150806, which is about how long a human being can go without sleep. The statement goes on top of the filing cabinet, and Martin too has been dispensed with. He notices, without really wanting to, that Jon’s hands are shaking, and turns to go.

Then someone, possibly Tim, slams a door on the other side of the Archive. That would be fine, if it weren’t for all the recent knocking through of the drywall. None of the structures that hid the Millbank tunnels were loadbearing – if they had been, the Archive would be buried in a building-sized grave right now – but the newly aerated architecture has made it easier for vibrations to pass through the bricks. Minor Phenomena and Associated Artefacts 1970-1975 – that’s the box label, which means it probably contains twelve dead tarantulas and a kazoo – shifts to the edge of a shelf, and Martin shouts, “Jon, look out!” 

Which is, of course, what makes Jon turn around and take a step. Then Minor Phenomena 1970 lands on his head, he hits the ground and Tim comes scurrying at the sound of the crash. Elias was already in the next room looking for a lost budget spreadsheet, and one of the practical researchers upstairs starts yelling about all the noise. Martin has to take a deep breath, to block them all out, to stare at the ground and take in the sight of a body laid out where previously one was not.

(He’ll remember that, much later. A human accident. Blood on the floor of the Archive.)

*

They spend about four hours in A&E, all told. The doctor who eventually calls them in asks gentle questions about whether Jon lost consciousness at all when he hit the ground and gets him to track a moving torch with his eyes. Martin explains what happened and she nods, as though they are normal people with normal lives. Normal people get concussed all the time, apparently. “And you’re his… partner?”

“Colleague,” Martin says, startled. It takes a moment before it occurs to him what this must have looked like, this long afternoon they’ve spent waiting to be seen, with Jon mostly quiet and pliant, letting Martin make him drink water from a plastic bottle. Other than them, the only people in the waiting room were construction workers with minor injuries and some City posh boys who need their stomachs pumped at 2pm. Someone’s service dog snoozed by Martin’s feet. It was almost… peaceful. “I, ah, I’m his archival assistant.”

The doctor looks like she’s wondering why “archival assistant” sounds like it has initial caps. “But that’s an office job, right? Not heavy machinery or dangerous substances?” 

Jon isn’t so concussed that he and Martin can’t exchange glances.

“No,” Martin says. “Not… heavy machinery.”

“Right, fine, put it in your accident book and don’t leave him alone for a while,” the doctor says, putting away her little torch. She hands Martin a leaflet. “Complications from a concussion can manifest up to forty-eight hours after an initial blow to the head. Someone needs to be watching him at all times.”

“Someone _is_ watching me at all times,” Jon says. It’s probably meant to come out in his reading-statements voice, edged with darkness and intrigue. In the sunlight of Guy’s A&E on a weekday afternoon, it comes out a little sad and delusional. 

The doctor looks like she’s going to say something else, but Martin puts an arm around Jon and steers him out, with what he hopes is a reassuring look over his shoulder at the doctor. Everything’s fine, is what he hopes to convey. Nothing lurks in the shadows or in the ground beneath your feet, why would you even think such a thing.

“Mr Blackwood—“ the doctor begins, but Martin stuffs the leaflet in his pocket and keeps pushing Jon along.

“I’ll look after him,” he says, because whatever happens, that part’s true. After they’ve filled in whatever paperwork you need to for the NHS to release you into polite society, they end up on the street outside, looking at each other. Martin is unsure, and Jon… is concussed. Martin had sort of not believed it, not really, not even after all the hours in here during which he gave Martin no trouble at all, and the calm pronouncement of the doctor. It isn’t like Jon to be stilled by anything, not even a box falling off a filing cabinet, or being eaten alive by worms. 

“I, ah,” Jon says, looking pale and interesting. Normally Martin does think he looks interesting: a thirty-something otherwise nondescript man but with shadows of strangeness, too much grey in his hair and the delicate traceries of scars, visible in bright light. But right now he looks pale, interesting, and nauseous, which was in one of the leaflets. 

“What is it?” Martin asks, as gently as he dares to.

“I was going to say, I live on my own,” Jon says, with a brief return of his familiar tetchiness. There’s an unspoken question hanging there, and a few years ago Martin would either not have heard it or gone out of his way not to do so. But in these last days, weeks, it’s a thought that tends to occur and recur to him, with Jon. _Don’t leave him alone._ Don’t let him get into the kind of knife-edged trouble that would fight his body for his skin.

“Come home with me, then,” Martin says, feeling sure of himself for once. “Just for tonight. I’ll be able to check on you.”

“Martin, I’m _fine_ ,” Jon says, because if he didn’t complain Martin would worry. “You don’t need to—“

“This way,” Martin says.

*

Martin lives in Stockwell, all the way along the Northern line rattling through the dark. He read once that this stretch of the tunnels has the highest decibel level on the network and if they worked here rather than just being passengers they’d have ear protection. Jon seems besieged by the noise. They get to Martin’s tiny flat, which is still a bit dusty and unlived in – it’s only been a couple of weeks since he moved back out of the Archives, and his tinned food compulsion is worse than ever – but it’s got its sofa and squashy armchair in their proper places, and double-stacked shelves.

“Nice place,” Jon says, without any apparent sarcasm; his eyes are on the books. Martin likes writing poetry, always has, but to write it well you have to read it, and Martin’s shelves spill out Keats and Heaney and Eavan Boland and others that are more obscure. Jon leans down and picks a volume of Stephen Vincent Benét off the floor, still open to the page Martin was on last night. “I shall not sleep tonight when I hear the plane,” he says, absently.

“Do you want tea,” Martin says, leaving off the question mark for once. Jon might still be Martin’s irritable, forceful, kind-of-a-dick boss, but even he seems softer outside the confines of the Institute. As though the sharp edges of paper and spools of magnetic tape are for him, skeletal; as though without them he can’t quite hold himself up.

“Tea,” Jon agrees. Martin makes it and they sit on the sofa for a while, Jon taking slow, meticulous sips, not commenting on the excess of sugar that Martin put in for the calories. 

“I thought – well, I thought,” Martin says, at last, nervous again. “You can stay here, and we can go into the Institute together in the morning, and then by the time you finish work it’ll be nearly forty hours, so… that’s probably enough. If you’re okay with that.“

“Yes, all right.” Tetchy again, but at least he’s agreed to it. Martin knows he’s just consigned himself to a ludicrously long working day tomorrow, but that’s fine. It’s fine. _Don’t leave him alone._

He orders a pizza without consulting Jon. He’s had some experience of feeding people who don’t want to eat and knows that the first step is just putting the food in front of them. Jon takes a couple of bites, which is a couple of bites more than nothing. Eventually Jon leans back and yawns, which raises a question which they can’t avoid all night.

“You live in London,” Jon says, which makes Martin wonder if non sequiturs are a symptom of concussion, but Jon shakes his head impatiently. “I mean, you don’t have a spare room.”

“No, sorry,” Martin says, not sure why he’s apologising for the state of their collective generation. “But I don’t think you should-- ” 

He stops, realising to his horror that the rest of that sentence was going to be: _share my bed_. It’s half-full of books and his laptop charger is probably wound up in there as well, and also, wait, yes, Jon is his _boss_. Martin is starting to feel peculiar in the head. 

“I’m not sure if I have to watch you all the time,” he amends, weakly. “Like, do I have to watch you sleep?”

Jon shivers. “Please, Martin, I can think of things less conducive to sleep than being stared at in the process by one of my archival assistants, but not many.” 

“Yeah, sorry, I shouldn’t have—“

“Also.” Jon has interrupted Martin like he always does, but he looks confused, as though it was just a reflex with no words to follow through. “I, ah. I don’t sleep.”

“I know,” Martin says. “I know you don’t sleep.”

They don’t actually make any progress with the question. Martin puts the cold pizza in the fridge and looks in passing at his orange-juice-sleeping-tablet tableau. He’s not an idiot: he knows this would be a perfect opportunity. He doesn’t touch anything and hurries back into the living room. Jon is sitting on the sofa, leafing again through another of Martin’s books of poetry. _In Blackwater Woods_ , Mary Oliver, not what Martin would have expected him to choose. Jon seems engrossed. Martin boots up his laptop and answers the very few non-work emails he gets in a day. Sets up the direct debit for the gas bill he’s been meaning to do for ages. Jon is on the other side of the sofa, leafing through _Blackwater_. He finishes it, picks up a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets, reads a little, puts it down. Then, _A Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out_. Richard Siken, one of Martin’s own favourites. 

“I’m sorry I don’t have much else for you to read,” Martin says, after a while. The evening has thickened around them, the room filled with soft shadows.

Jon doesn’t answer for a minute, his long fingers running softly through pages. “It’s fine, Martin,” he says, and then: “Thank you.”

He sounds drowsy. The moment feels precious and transient, the last of the daylight bleeding from the room. Through the window, people passing on the street seem like black-paper cutouts. Martin doesn’t move, watching as the book slowly slips from Jon’s fingers, and lands face-down on the floor. It was a long day for him, too, accidents and A&E on top of the statement he was reading in the morning, about a man choked to death by the growth of ivy. He puts away the laptop and falls asleep where he is, his head pillowed uncomfortably on the sofa cushions.

He dreams of Jon and the Archive, mixed up with lines from the litany in the book on the floor. _Are you there, sweetheart, is this microphone live_ , distorted as though recorded on magnetic tape. When Martin wakes up again, it’s past midnight and Jon is sleeping, so lightly that a blanket dropped over him makes him stir. Martin stands still in the dark, willing him to settle, for all the world’s dark things to leave them be. He was raised Catholic, but that same God who didn’t save Father Burroughs can’t care much for the Archivist and his assistants. It’s a reflex and a plea to nothing.

But Jon drifts off again, and everything feels comfortable and silent. Martin listens out of habit for scratching at the door, but hears nothing. The rest of the night can claim them both.

*

In the morning Martin wakes up sore and stiff. Jon is gone, and Martin blinks for a moment before leaping to his feet, terrified that Jon has got dizzy and hit his head on something or possibly just fled mysteriously into the night. But Martin finds him rooting through the fridge for a bottle of milk. “Morning,” Martin says, as Jon sets the milk on the counter next to the orange juice and boxes of tablets.

Martin freezes. Jon’s not an idiot either. A few seconds crawl by before Jon says, “Were these for me?”

“Yes,” Martin says. It’s possible to lie to the Archivist, but difficult. This time he didn’t even want to try.

“Ah.” Jon’s eyes are unreadable.

“I wouldn’t have done it, though,” Martin says, wanting to push the tablets off the edge if the counter into the bin beneath. “I just—I thought, if you could just get a night’s sleep, and stop wandering around like the Ghost of Christmas Future, you might—you know. Not be… like this.”

Jon stares at him a moment longer. Then he turns away and puts the milk in his own and Martin’s tea. “We’re going to be late.”

“Jon,” Martin says, helplessly. “I just—I was worried. I’m still worried.”

“I know,” Jon says, without looking up. He doesn’t seem to want to talk and Martin can’t blame him. He goes off to get dressed in a daze and when he gets back Jon is more or less where Martin left. He looks tired, as always, but sharp. It must have been a mild concussion after all. 

“I wouldn’t have done it,” Martin says again, more to himself than Jon. As he says it, he knows it’s true. There's a certain type of person who would look at a troubled, paranoid man and drug him for his own good; there's a certain type of person who would say that the ends justify the means. But Martin isn't that kind of person, not yet; not even in this world that shifts under their feet and crawls with unspeakable horrors. 

“I know,” Jon says again, eyes bright. “And I did, you know.”

“What?”

“Get a good night’s sleep,” Jon says, giving Martin an arch, fond look. Halfway to the Tube, Martin realises that he's brought the orange juice along, because he’s a dick. He gives it to Martin to break the seal, and they share it on the rest of the journey. In the Archive, Tim has reassembled Minor Phenomena 1970-1975, which contained exactly what it said on the label. Jon almost smiles. Martin thinks this might be an okay day.

**Author's Note:**

>  ~~So I have listened to a ludicrous number of episodes of this show in a very short period of time, but I've only just hit the start of s3, "A Guest for Mr Spider" - please, please don't spoil me in the comments!~~ caught up! thank you for your indulgence.


End file.
